The present invention relates generally to employee management tools and in particular to a system configured to manage the work schedules of a plurality of employees.
Historically, management and scheduling of a large employee workforce has been a complex and time consuming task. With regard to scheduling large groups of employees, it is difficult to predict the number of employees required to adequately staff a particular shift. Once the number of required employees is determined, employees must each be assigned a work schedule. Scheduling employees can be a complex task as many different factors constrain which employees may be selected for a particular shift. For example, scheduling limitations exist regarding hours worked per week, hours worked per day, or other factors. Further, some employees are available to work only certain days and/or certain hours. In addition, employees may wish to take vacation time, or to schedule changes for other reasons. Further, certain shifts may unexpectedly require additional employees to meet unexpected increases in workload, or conversely, certain shifts may require fewer employees than previously anticipated.
Workforce Management (WFM) systems have been developed to assist businesses deal with the challenges of workforce scheduling, particularly in environments where the staffing requirements are variable. Call centers are an excellent example of such an environment. Being correctly staffed is essential to efficient operation of a call center, since too many employees will result in excess labor costs, and two few will results in lost opportunity and/or poor customer service.
The current state of the art for WFM Systems consists of two steps, forecasting how many people will be required for each period of time, and then generating the schedules of the workforce to best meet the forecasted requirements. This results in new schedules for the employees with each new forecast. In order to make the scheduling process friendlier to the employees many systems will allow the manual entry of employee preferences and limitations.
A major deficiency in the current state of the art for WFM systems is that the forecasting/scheduling tasks must be accomplished in enough time to notify the workforce of the required schedules. If the employees schedule will not be fixed, but will be determined by the scheduling system for each period scheduled, you must, as a practical matter, inform people of the schedules they will be expected to work far enough in advance so that they will be available to work their scheduled shifts. This necessitates considerable lead time in the creation of a forecast. Often the schedule is created before all information that would be useful for forecasting is available. Also, any significant change to the forecasting criteria which results in changes to the forecast forces upon management the difficult choice of regenerating schedules for the employees or just trying to adjust the workforce outside of the WFM system.
Another major deficiency with the current state of the art for WFM Systems is that there is often resistance on the part of the employees to work shifts that are (from the employees perspective) arbitrarily assigned by the WFM System. Features like employee preferences, shift bids, and the ability to lock down some of the schedules are attempts to mitigate this problem; however they are not adequate solutions to the problem because loaded information is static and lives are dynamic. The system cannot forecast people's actual preferences because they change from day to day.
State of the art Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems are quite sophisticated in how they allow calls to be routed to a population of call center agents. One of the challenges in routing calls to agents is how to achieve economies of scale when call volumes are low. An effective way to address this problem is to employ multi-skilled agents. A pool of agents who are known to the ACD as being able to handle multiple skills, call types, can greatly increase the efficiency of all the agents working the skills. Multi-Skilled (MS) Agents have beneficial impact to the efficiency of agents in a call center that is disproportionate to their numbers in the population.
While the benefits provided by the employment of MS Agents are well established, and the ACD systems provide excellent support for their use, the current state of the art of WFM systems is not up to the task of dealing with the challenges presented by the MS Agent. Most systems make no attempt to deal with MS Agents beyond simply noting that a person scheduled to skill A will also be working skill B.
The real challenge presented by the MS Agents is that the number of agents required is driven by the total number of calls that will be received and must therefore be determined independently for each skill. However the number of agents scheduled is calculated by the particular combination of skills that each agent is working. One agent working three skills is not the equivalent of three agents each works one skill. This makes calculating how many agents are scheduled to work any given skill difficult to calculate when you have MS Agents. Most WFM systems calculate all agents as single skilled for scheduling purposes.
Several attempts have been made to overcome these types of problems however, these attempts do not fully overcome the disadvantages of the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,499,291, issued to Kepley, describes a scheduling system that communicates an agents schedule directly to the agent at the agent's terminal, thereby preventing the need for manual distribution. The schedule is presented to the agents via video displays that are at each agents actual work station, and thus are available for viewing by a particular agent only when that agent is seated at his or her workstation. Furthermore, the Kepley reference does not provide means to account for schedule changes. Absent these features, a system based on the teachings of Kepley still suffers from many of the disadvantages of the prior art.
Likewise, U.S. Pat. No. 5,289,368, issued to Jordan et al, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,325,292, issued to Crockett, both of which share a common specification, describe systems and methods used to help schedule employee work shifts. However, the methods and apparatus of these systems still possess several disadvantages of the prior art. Among others, system configured according to the teachings of these references still lack an ability to schedule based on employee and not shift, lack an ability to provide the schedules on an employee distributed basis and lack the ability to conveniently and easily deal with schedule changes.
Therefore, what is needed is a new method, apparatus and computer readable medium for maintaining a work schedule. More specifically, what is needed is a method that grants the agent a greater degree of control over their work schedule while at the same time meeting the staffing needs of the enterprise. As described below, the present invention overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art by providing a new method and apparatus for maintaining a work schedule.